Hi Eric, thanks for the feedback. On 04/26/2012 04:17 PM, Eric Blake wrote: > On 04/26/2012 03:30 AM, Stefano Lattarini wrote: >> This will avoid a lot of useless conflicts or botched merges in the >> NEWS file. These have already happened many times with our old setup >> where there was just one NEWS files. >> >> * NEWS: Removed, split into ... >> * NEWS.maint, old/NEWS: ... these two files. >> * NEWS.master: New file, still empty (it will be filled in master >> only). >> * Makefile.am (EXTRA_DIST): Distribute them. >> (NEWS): Generate it by properly concatenating the three new files. > > Ah, so there is still a NEWS file in tarballs, it's just that the split > makes it easier to ensure that the generated NEWS file is always in the > correct order regardless of which branch you are building the tarball > from, and that merging one branch into another won't hit any conflicts > because the NEWS items in the various branches go to the correct > building-block in the first place. Seems like an interesting solution. > Well, honestly, thinking about the issue again, I'm not sure this patch is truly warranted. Let me elaborate on this.
Most of the confusion and mess-ups with NEWS in the 1.11.x series have been due to the fact that we had in fact *three*, not two, versions of NEWS, weirdly inter-related and conflicting: one in maint, one in branch-1.11 (were the changes from maint almost never merged cleanly) and one in master (where the changes from maint merged more-or-less cleanly, but which had to be manually resynced with the ones in branch-1.11, to make it appear as it was a follow-up to that -- which it was according to the history of distribution tarballs, but not according to the history in the version control system -- aargh! Now that we only have 'master' and 'maint' as long-lived branches (ok, there's 'ng/master' as well, but there we have a separated file 'NG-NEWS'), the NEWS changes should merge and sync easily and cleanly. So I wish to take back my proposed patch, and substitute it with a trivial patch that just edit '.gitattributes' not to specify the "union" merge driver for NEWS anymore. WDYT? Thanks, and sorry for the confusion, Stefano